My new essay 'Injury and inhibition', published today on Aeon.co discusses the life and legacy of Phineas Gage, who survived a brain injury in 1848 and went on to become one of the most frequently-cited neuropsychology case studies of all time.

When I started researching my recent BBC essay , one question in the back of my mind was, how am I going to draw a black hole? There aren't exactly a wealth of images of the real thing - just a handful of blurry telescope images to go by: orange doughnuts floating in darkness . But once I got onto the drawing phase of the project I realised this situation actually gave me a great deal of artistic freedom not available in my last illustrated essay (in which I felt a significa

During the 1980s, when I was something less than ten years old, my brother and I auditioned for roles in a stage adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Junglebook. Despite the fact that, as far as I could tell, I was the better actor, my brother was cast in the lead role of Mowgli while I was given a non-speaking role as one of a chorus of monkeys. I understood that my brother seemed more wild. He had a restless energy that he found hard to disguise, he was more energetic, less self

1948 reconstruction of Louis Slotin’s 1946 criticality accident (with physicist Chris Wright posing as Slotin) Last week, after literally months of research and development, my graphic essay ‘The Blue Flash’ was published by BBC Future . Sitting somewhere between web-comic and illustrated essay, I developed the piece after seeing photographs of a reconstruction of Slotin's accident commissioned in 1948 by Los Alamos National Laboratories (formerly the 'Project Y' bomb develop

Today I have two offerings on the Manhattan Project. The first is my graphic essay, The Blue Flash for BBC Future. The result of many months of research, it's a study of a fatal accident that happened at Los Alamos National Laboratories in May 1946. Louis Slotin was manually demonstrating a test procedure for plutonium cores when something went wrong. The essay draws on ideas about causality, human perception of hazard, and quantum mechanical theory to ask how and why the

A few weeks ago I was interviewed for for Dan Snow's History Hit podcast on the subject of of Saint-Alban, the psychiatric hospital that acted as a hub for the French resistance during the 2nd World War. I originally wrote about this for Aeon back in September 2021 . The interview is now live. You can listen to it using the doo-dah below, or just search your preferred outlet for 'Dan Snow's History Hit'. The episode is dated March 9th 2023 and titled 'The Psychiatric Hospit

This year is the 30th anniversary of Madonna's photo-book Sex . I was an adolescent when it was published but I clearly remember a conversation between some critics on the radio at the time. One of them said Madonna's boobs were 'lower' than they'd expected: the intimation being that her body was somehow not as 'good' as they had anticipated. Another said "It's like she can't get naked enough," suggesting, as I understood it, that the images came across as effortful in a way

In the summer of 2020 I started revisiting Jack Kirby's artwork for Marvel Comics. In particular I was looking at his early drawings for his masterpiece of nuclear-gothic, the Incredible Hulk , first published in May 1962: My first attempts to copy Kirby's drawing were not, in my opinion, excellent. This one just looks wrong: This one's head is way too wide and squashed: Still having trouble with the shape of the head here - having to add more hair to make it bigger, ending u

This is the final part of Marie-Rose Ourabah’s story of asylum. Here she reflects on the impact of her experiences as a refugee during...

This is the story of how Marie-Rose Ourabah, daughter of François and Hélène Tosquelles, escaped Spain after her father was sentenced to...

In my correspondence with Marie-Rose Ourabah, daughter of François and Hélène Tosquelles, I asked her to tell me the story of how her...

During the research for my essay, Asylum, I corresponded with Marie-Rose Ourabah, daughter of François and Hélène Tosquelles, central...

In 1936, the poet Paul Éluard helped to organise an exhibition of work by surrealists from across Europe. In June of that year, when the...

During my research for the Asylum essay, I’ve been corresponding with Marie-Rose Ourabah, author and daughter of Francois Tosquelles. I...

Late last year, a friend invited me to watch a film called Our Lucky Hours. Directed by Martine Deyres, it tells the fascinating story of...